Dina Goder. Between Nice and stand-up

The second half of November turned out to be a festival for me. It’s not that there were no premieres in Moscow at that time, but there weren’t any significant or ambitious ones, so I decided to focus on festivals and tours.

First there was the Russian Art Festival in Nice. This event is being held for the sixth time, although the first two were in Cannes. It is quite entertaining, although it takes place in an atmosphere that is unusually relaxed for a journalist accustomed to the frantic rush of festivals. There are one or two events per day, no more. However, it is intended in the last place for metropolitan journalists. And firstly - on the residents of a large, rich, but very provincial city in the French south.

The main venue of the festival, which is held by the ACR association (Academy of Russian Culture in France), is the huge building of the National Theater of Nice in the very center of the city. Accordingly, the main visitors to the Ten Days of Russian Art are Nice theatergoers, primarily those who bought a subscription to NTN for the whole year. And subscriptions, as a rule, are bought by wealthy and middle-aged people - thoroughbred ladies with bluish gray hair and bald men in expensive suits. Among this public, as has become clear over the years of the festival, the greatest success is that which is perceived as Russian classical art or national exotica. This year, the State Symphony Orchestra of St. Petersburg, conducted by Vladimir Rylov, was responsible for all Russian classical art. He performed at a gala concert of Russian opera for Glinka's anniversary. The quality of the concert - a sluggish orchestra coupled with the most despondent soloists - was conducive to sleep, but the elderly local audience was very pleased. They said that last year the Belarusian Opera and Ballet Theater was responsible for the “classics” with the ballet “Spartacus” and it caused even greater enthusiasm in the audience, although Moscow ballet critics who were at the performance either rolled their eyes or died laughing, amazed at the archaism of the spectacle .

As a national exotic, there were Yakut drama, Eskimo dances, the Dagestan ensemble "Lezginka" and much more, and all were a huge success. And this year, the Song and Dance Ensemble of Tatarstan (for the 1000th anniversary of Kazan) took the cake for everything national, and again the audience was completely delighted. However, there are no complaints about the Tatar artists - they worked honestly: they sang like nightingales, walked like peahens and jumped up and down, changing multi-colored costumes after each performance, but for the few domestic spectators it all looked like a kind of “cranberry” and was reminiscent of a Kremlin reporting concert.

Having worked through the “mandatory program” to please local theatergoers, the festival began to educate the public - it introduced the public to contemporary Russian art, which this time turned out to be entirely St. Petersburg. It must be said that in this regard the background of the festival in Nice looks very convincing: Ginkas came here with a performance based on Chagall (the artist is buried not far from the city), there was also the Shadow Theater, and Grishkovets, and the modern dance theaters of Tatyana Baganova and Olga Pona. This time the AXE theater came with the “ Wet Wedding ” we know (here it was called the “Alchemical Wedding” after a medieval French treatise) - the thousand-strong hall was divided into indignantly “booing” older spectators and enthusiastically squealing and whistling young people. A modern Russian play was represented by “Valentine’s Day” by Ivan Vyrypaev (a sentimental continuation of the old play by Mikhail Roshchin “Valentin and Valentina”). All the middle-aged French spectators shed tears over this performance, staged by Vasily Senin (Baltic House Theatre). And when distributing the prizes of the audience jury, which were accepted at the festival, “Valentine’s Day” received a small award.

And the main prize went to, and indeed the main Nice event was, Andrei Moguchy’s play “Between a Dog and a Wolf,” based on the novel by Sasha Sokolov in co-production with NTN especially for the festival. " Formal Theater " Moguchy began rehearsing the performance already in Nice, arriving a month before the premiere. However, Andrei asked to call this show not a premiere, but rather a sketch of the performance - he believed that everything that had been done was still so crude that after the final revision in St. Petersburg the performance would become completely different. Unfortunately, I had to leave the festival before the show, but I saw the rehearsals, heard a lot of stories and talked to Muscovites who, after the festival, spoke enthusiastically about the performance. Apparently, the success was complete - the French received the production of the Mighty with the same admiration as our compatriots.

From Russia, the “Formal Theater” brought for the performance a mountain of all kinds of garbage, bought at flea markets or found on occasion (the artist “Dogs...” Barmaley, who loves to work with recyclable materials, knows a lot about this). Tattered robes and sheepskin coats, scanty earflaps, worn-out boots, fragments of musical instruments, barrels, brooms, graters, clamps, a gramophone, accordions and many other picturesque objects of unknown purpose hung in rows from the poles along the entire stage, forming something similar to a forest. Barmaley looked at the “collection” with concern and at what seemed too new and clean to him, he “finished it.” Mighty said with surprise: “But the French have excellent garbage dumps! When we made the “School for Fools” in Germany, we couldn’t find anything useful there, we had to bring everything down to the last rusty nail from St. Petersburg, but here there are such luxurious finds “You can’t tell them from the Russians!” - and proudly showed some strange copper device with doors and glass. On a huge stage, all this beauty hung in several tiers, and a video made by the Mighty’s resident video artist Alexander Malyshev was projected onto the backdrop: Bruegel’s winter paintings coming to life.

Anyone who has seen the previous performance of Moguchy based on Sasha Sokolov - the wonderful "School for Fools", which at one time received the Golden Mask - does not need to explain what the genre of "pictures for a novel" is: impressionistically light, almost wordless and very musical an action in which irony is inseparable from lyricism. “The Dog...” has a lot in common with “The School...”, and it is difficult to understand how Sokolov’s curly, viscous, verbose novel, in which events cannot always be detected behind the stylistic games, turned into such a transparent stage life of foolish and ragged Russian men. They swarm and play, as if in Bruegel’s paintings, and Russian culture naturally exists between them, either in the form of a caricature of Pushkin with a hare, who, as we know, once crossed his path, or in the form of a handsome man in leggings and a tailcoat, who at rehearsals was conventionally called Onegin . Either in the form of a ballerina in a tutu and on pointe shoes, into which the fair-haired and affectionate Sokolov whore Orina is transformed.

As for the actors, Moguchy now has a real “dream team”: “Dog...” brought together the brightest, liveliest and prone to improvisation actors who worked with him over the years of the existence of the “Formal Theater”. Even the hilariously funny Oleg Zhukovsky returned, who once started with Moguchiy, and in recent years played in the famous “Tree”. And it will be a great shame if this amazing company remains homeless in St. Petersburg.

Returning from Nice to Moscow, I found the height of the Stand-up comedy festival, organized by the Afisha magazine. The new event was to be opened by Renata Litvinova, who announced her solo performance as a conversation with the audience about love. But the film star and aspiring theater actress, whose performance sold a particularly large number of tickets, got scared just before the performance and called in sick, so the festival really began with two stand-ups: an authentic Englishman named Ian Stone and Psoy Korolenko with a partner under the pretentious in the name of the Collective Unconscious.

Stone was good. The classic small-nosed Jew, sarcastic and nimble, the way we imagine a “stand-up” performer after the film “Lenny” with Dustin Hoffman, chatted for an hour with the audience gathered in the club “On Brestskaya”, who understood him without any translator and sometimes retorted so that the celebrity did not have time to react and answered the famous: “I’m asking the questions here!” However, there was no real “tough guy”, although it was a bit difficult for shy spectators. For example, Stone pestered a man sitting in the front row for a long time: “What is your name? Don’t you remember? Look, maybe it’s written on the jacket? What? Hugo Boss?” When the man tried to retreat to the back rows, Stone moved after him, continuing to have fun. In general, the themes of the performance were traditional for stand-up. Sex: "Let's warm up - hands up, to the sides, on the neighbors' genitals. Have you warmed up?.. I recently saw such an erection in a man in the shower of the pool!" Jewish: “I hope everyone understands that I’m a Jew? Are there any Muslims? Yeah, some tension has arisen!.. Foreskin? I have one too - it’s in a jar at home!” Politics: “Why do you have such a Nazi theme in the design of the Kievskaya metro station: blondes in brown shirts? It seems I started this theme too early?” Religious: "I'll only talk for seven and a half hours, and then we'll all pray... Well, how do you like The Passion of the Christ?.. If your religion is so fragile that it reacts to jokes, look at you..." Drugs : "I don't like drugs - because of my nose I have to spend £60 on one snuff." And so on: pedophilia, homosexuality and other subjects that you can’t ignore.

After this cheerful joker, the performance that Psoy Korolenko and Kirill Bogolyubov gave on the same stage looked depressing. Having hung a portrait of Arkady Raikin over the stage, a couple of performers decided to show the audience what they considered traditional Soviet stand-up: Raikin himself, Ilchenko with Kartsev, Tarapunka with Shtepsel, Zhvanetsky, “Zucchini 13 Chairs”, parodist Alexander Ivanov, epigrams by Valentin Gaft and so on . But all this is in a prepared form, with some sort of intellectual twist, such as including in Kartsev’s dialogue about the warehouse of demands to immediately produce a “nameless signifier” or “pubertator”, or in some humoresque about a prostitute inserting a few words about her interest in Kierkegaard and Leibniz. Then, of course, Jung and Heidegger appeared in jokes, not to mention Sorokin and Pelevin. At the same time, the young man Bogolyubov, who is of little use for the stage (who in press releases characterizes himself only as “an experimental scientist, an original theologian, a radical psychologist and a psychopath”), as well as my very beloved and incredibly talented Psoy, looked dull, pretentious and strained jokers from amateur performances in which the gloomy audience does not throw tomatoes only out of delicacy and respect for past merits.

Unfortunately, I was not able to see any other performances at this festival, but I know from stories that the fashionable Presnyakov brothers, who promised to read their new mysterious opus “Ex-sex” themselves, ultimately refused to perform. That Andrei Lapin, who looked like a bodybuilder, who was going to expound something tantric, in the presence of numerous fans, gradually stripped naked and talked about how to achieve orgasm. That Elena Morozova and Sergei Frolov, who acted out the text by Rodion Beletsky, went into the hall to ask the audience about their first sexual experience, and the most successful of the domestic stand-up artists, Nikolai Fomenko, also did not stray far from the plots of the “material-bodily bottom.” All this, however, is interesting in its own way.

And now, having relaxed among the ambiguous jokes, Muscovites should get ready for a new powerful festival cannonade, which begins now and will distract us for a long time from the current theatrical premieres. The AXE group, which had already arrived from Nice, began playing a grandiose performance-travel “Sine loco” at Crocus Expo. On December 1st, the NET festival will begin with Joseph Naja's play "The Diary of an Unknown Man", which this time has a very strong program, including a performance by Korsunovas, two performances by Ostermeier, a performance by the unknown but very famous Arpad Schilling and much more. In addition, in December, performances by two geniuses will be shown in Moscow: the world premiere of “Song of Songs” by Nyakrosius and “The Window Cleaner” by Pina Bausch. I’m silent about everything else.